Associate research professor David Wettergreen demonstrates how Scarab will squat its 550-pound body close to the lunar surface and employ a Canadian-made drill to pierce the regolith (moon rock) and analyze the soil below it. Because Scarab isn't meant to return home, it will have to analyze soil itself; samples are fed into its reactor, where they are cooked and analyzed for makeup and concentrations.

If that sounds time-consuming, don't worry: Scarab's power plant would keep it roving the moon's surface for nearly a decade, albeit at a poky .2 miles per hour. Funded through NASA's In Situ Resource Utilization program, Scarab is part of a generation of autonomous robots meant to take human risk out of prospecting for resources in increasingly hostile, remote locales.